Screen couldn’t do vertical splits for the longest time. That started to be a bigger problem when screens got bigger and wider. I believe that’s why I started using tmux. Tmux also has more facilities for automation. Nowadays, screen is primarily in maintenance mode, and I’m used to tmux, so no reason to switch back.
I think a lot of it is that tmux had friendler, sane defaults and clearer command design (eg. status bar out of the box). And, I suspect, people not already knowing screen.
The latter reason is why Helix is slow in doing similar to vim, I think, despite being far more consistently designed and saner defaults. Everyone knows vim exists.
I've still never switched from screen, personally, though I'm only a light user.
Defaults matter. I've had my screenrc with a status line but I still ended up preferring tmux in the end, because not needing a config file was a small but pleasant advantage when working with different machines. I also didn't like ctrl+a as the leader combination, because it conflicts with "go to the beginning of the line" in bash. ctrl+b is a much nicer default.
The status bar displays key information to the user. Do you think people would prefer a video player with no play/pause, volume, seekbar or one with them? The interface is the most important part of any application.
There's two things that made me switch from tmux to screen:
- persistence of layouts. Screen doesn't remember if you had a split view open, it always opens the current terminal in full screen.
- screen's default hotkey ^A clashes with ssh's escape key. Yes, these are configurable but having to re-populate the same config file is like a papercut every time to access a new system.
Defaults matter, especially if you work across many different systems (and from different customers). At some point, it just becomes easier to learn the defaults than to (over-)optimize to your ideal workflow.